I also have Sprint, and my experience has been the same as yours, but Sprint is not without its customer service problems. At one level or another, all of the major providers seem to be running plays from the same book of dirty tricks. Fortunately for us, we haven't yet had to deal with such things from Sprint, but while I have no complaints to date, I'm not going to hold my breath.

... we could probably sell it to the Iraqi army.

Gas is pretty cheap in this country (relative to other parts of the world), and local governments are ridiculously broke right now. I think I could get behind a gas tax to help cover the current shortfalls. I recognize that increasing any taxes in the middle of a recession would be hugely unpopular, but in addition to keeping state and local governments afloat, an increase in the cost of gasoline could create incentives that might propel a lot of positive changes (the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars, reduced dependence on foreign oil through reduced consumption, increased use of public transporation, etc).

What I'd ultimately like is to see the proceeds of such a tax be used to increase availability of and access to public transportation across the country. But I imagine that once politicians get their hands on the money, they'll find all kinds of pet projects on which to spend it.

From: Kaspersky Labs
Date: The Future

Governments of the World,

Anonymity on the Internet is a problem. It has been linked to obesity, cancer, global warming, and other really bad things.* That is why Kaspersky Labs is pleased to announce a new product for the citizens of your country: the Internet Passport! No more do you or your citizens have to fear the terrible ills of anonymous Internet browsing. Now, you might be thinking, what will this incredible new technology cost me? For such an important application, a trillion dollars is not an outlandish price. However, given the critical importance of this technology in today's world, Kaspersky Labs is offering it for the low, low price of a billion dollars.** Sign up today and you'll also receive an offer for free antivirus software for you and a million of your citizens!*** Don't let this incredible opportunity pass you by!

Sincerely,

Kasperky Labs Marketing Dept.

* In that the Internet and the various terrible things listed and hinted at have existed together, at some point in their histories.

** Cost of software only; installation, management, and troubleshooting costs extra. Does not include annual per-user Internet passport licensing fees, which will be very high.

*** Contingent on the purchase of Kaspersky Labs antivirus software for the rest of your citizenry.

I had no idea who won in either of those years, so for the Slashdot readers out there who are also in the dark:

1994: Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres
2007: Al Gore, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Here is the complete list.

Not the dreaded upgrad fees! Those sound expensive!

How does your RSA key fare against wrenches?

Nah, it's too cold for that where I live. Looks like it's time to get one of those old-fashioned "land lines" installed (like your parents have, or maybe used to have).

In fact, as a general solution to some of the loss-of-privacy implications of new technology, may I suggest ... old technology?

Did they change the definition of "bankrupt" recently? Social security's costs will exceed its revenues in 2017; that does not mean Social Security will go bankrupt in 2017. The Social Security trust fund is expected to run out of money in 2037. And that assumes nothing is done about it in the next twenty-eight years. I don't want to give the government too much credit, but, for better or for worse, they can probably figure something out in that amount of time. According to the report by the trustees (see link), any healthcare-related cost-containment would immediately improve the outlook for the trust fund, so the ongoing discussion in congress about healthcare reform stands to ameliorate the situation with Social Security and Medicare if it does manage to lower healthcare-related expenses (again, for better or for worse; I don't know enough about the debate to call it either way).

Please allow me to enlighten you on the origins of cancer.

Background: Cancer is an uncontrolled growth of cells in the body. There is, and I am oversimplifying here for the sake of explanation, one reason that this occurs: mutation. When cells divide, a lot of very complicated things need to happen. If any of those things go wrong, a mutated cell can appear. Cells are supposed to destroy themselves if they detect that something is wrong, but sometimes the mutation affects this controlled cell death, so they don't. Combine that mutation with one that causes the cell to divide very rapidly, and you have a cancerous cell. You can read more about the specifics of these kinds of mutations in this wikipedia article.

Statistics: Cells have a lot of safeguards in place to protect them against mutation, so the odds are extremely small that any one particular cell will become cancerous. However, there are a lot of cells in your body. Estimates differ, but most seem to be on the order of 10^13 (a multiple of 10 trillion). So while the odds of one particular cell becoming cancerous are not very good, the odds of one of those trillions of cells becoming cancerous are much better. One "hit" (cancer-related mutation) against a cell might not make that cell cancerous; recall from the previous section that the two mutations needed are (1) the inability to self-destruct and (2) a propensity for rapid division. However, once a cell has a "hit" against it, it becomes more likely that such a cell (or its progeny, since they inherit the "hit") will become cancerous later on. This is why some people are predisposed to develop certain kinds of cancer: some of their cells already have one "hit" against them.

Cancer and Longevity: Over time, those odds become more significant for more people. When people lived shorter lives, cancer was not as great a concern, because few people lived long enough to develop a life-threatening form of cancer. With life expectancies increased into the 70s and 80s for many people, the possibility of developing a life-threatening form of cancer has increased commensurately.

Cancer in Men: This brings us to the most common form of cancer in men, prostate cancer. If they live long enough, most men will develop prostate cancer. This is because prostate cancer rates are primarily linked to age. However, and there are more details in the link, most men never even know they have it; you are more likely to die from other causes (including just plain old age) than from prostate cancer. That is why the fact that "in excess of 50 percent of just the male population will develop some form of cancer" exists: most men will develop prostate cancer.

Personal Electronics and Mutation: The concern that radiation emitted by personal electronic devices causes cancer is still a point of much dispute and ongoing investigation. It is known that radiation damages a cell's DNA, potentially causing cancerous mutations. However, there are a variety of sources of such radiation, as documented on this Idaho State University webpage. This webpage from the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management further documents our greater exposure to natural forms of radiation (cosmic rays, etc) than consumer devices.

So if the implication in your statement is that "from somewhere" must include the radiation from personal electronics, that can't be ruled out. But your statement is constructed in such a way as to suggest that the rates of cancer you mention are tied to the forms of radiation under discussion. That, in my opinion, is very misleading, especially since the majority of cancers that make up the statistic you cite (prostate cancer) are most strongly tied to age, not to any particular form of radiation.

This struck me as a really innovative idea. I admit that I haven't played any of the games in the article (except the Oregon Trail back in the first grade), but from the comments, it sounds like Civilization got quite a few people interested in history and world civilizations. Does anyone remember playing Number Munchers? That was a far more entertaining way to learn multiplication, factoring, and inequalities than a bunch of worksheets. That's the game I remember the most, but that wasn't the only game we played during class. There were others that became a part of our curriculum for weeks, about which and from which I don't remember a damn thing. Even Oregon Trail didn't seem all that instructional to me. I didn't have any better sense of the hardships of western explorers after having played it. All I really took away from the Oregon Trail was: it's easy (and fun!) to shoot wild animals, but it's hard to get all those animals into your wagon. And they spoil so quickly!

Selecting the appropriate game for each subject and age group seems to me like the most difficult part of this curriculum. For example, how much Mesopotamian culture are these kids really going to soak up while they develop their graphic novelization of "Gilgamesh?" I'll bet that the future engineers will become masters of the multimedia application they're supposed to use, and when you ask them to tell you about Gilgamesh, they'll say, "Check out how realistically I rendered his fall from the tower! And look at this bitchin' eagle I made that broke his fall!," (I've never read Gilgamesh; here is the brief description from which I constructed my example) followed by a lengthy explanation of how they got the whole thing to work despite numerous setbacks and frustrations with the multimedia program, and how, when they write their multimedia program, it will have fewer bugs, more features, and just generally be way better.

Sorry, just trying to score some Funny points.

One of the earlier comments talked about a role-playing game in which the children had to work their way through a post-apocalyptic scenario: pick a leader, decide whether to open the bomb shelter door. That seems like an excellent game. Hopefully such innovative "real-life" games won't be permanently shelved in favor of electronic or board games during any move towards a more game-centric style of teaching.

Back to selecting age-appropriate, subject-specific games. I don't know much about such games, but per my experience with Number Munchers, it seems like such games could be a real boon (it also seems weird, as an adult, to be talking about Number Munchers as an excellent, age-appropriate mathematics game, instead of talking about how cool the game is and how far into the game I can get relative to my peers, as I did when I was in grade school). For example, Alice seems like an excellent teaching tool by which to introduce more kids to programming. And maybe Civiilization, or a game like it, can help drive home history material. At least initially, though, selecting the right game seems like the most difficult part of this approach (harder still: how do you determine whether it WAS the right game? How do you gauge effectiveness?). I do, however, applaud the attempt to try something novel, and despite having read and having had my initial enthusiasm tempered by the critics of this approach who have posted already, I admit that I am optimistic about the outcome.

4:00 AM: Intrepid counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, gun drawn, kicks open the door to a small flat in a run-down apartment building. The nefarious Evil-Doer turns to face the door, clearly shocked.

Evil-Doer (played by Jerry Seinfeld): Agent Jack Bauer! How can this be? That laptop had three, maybe four minutes of battery life left on it, at most! How could you possibly have downloaded those files in time?!
Jack Bauer: Simple.

Bauer turns to face the camera, which quickly zooms in on his face.

Jack Bauer: I used Internet Explorer 8.

A giant explosion rocks the screen, and a huge Internet Explorer logo appears.

Announcer: Internet Explorer 8. Because on the Internet, seconds matter.

You make a good point, but I think open source applications will need a larger user base before the pool of user-contributed solutions grows appreciably. And per the article (and the GP's comments), that larger user base isn't likely to manifest itself for applications that require complicated and poorly-documented configuration to get them up and running.

Also, for myself at least, if I read a wiki page or a blog post that describes the complicated hoops I have to jump through to get an open-source application working, I immediately start looking for an alternative; it seems likely (to me, at least) that other aspects of the application will be just as convoluted as the one that is described, only next time I might not be able to find a resource on the Internet that tells me what to do. Like the GP, I'm thinking about current and future investments of time.

I disagree that no protection is the best protection. Plenty of people make simple typing errors all the time when they go looking for a website. Bank0fAmerica (it's a zero; could you tell?) looks an awful lot like BankOfAmerica. As phishing attacks get more and more sophisticated, eliminating any kind of protection makes less and less sense; even smart people can get taken in by an expertly-executed phishing attack that uses a URL that very closely mimics the correct URL and a website that looks nearly identical to the actual website.

Regarding your analogy with motorcycles, statistics compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest that motorcyclists might actually drive less safely than people in air-bagged cars. In a fatal collision, when compared to passenger vehicles involved in such collisions, motorcyclists were found to be:

(1) More likely to have been speeding.
(2) More likely to have had their license suspended.
(3) More likely to have been driving with a suspended license.
(4) More likely to have been legally intoxicated.
(5) More likely to have a previous DUI on their record.

Please note: The report does not suggest that these behaviors are prevalent among motorcyclists, and it is not in any way my intention to suggest that they are. Most motorcyclists that I have seen on the road drive in a very safe manner. I am just summarizing the statistics from the NHTSA report.

Source: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/nhtsa_static_file_downloader.jsp?file=/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/Traffic%20Injury%20Control/Articles/Associated%20Files/810990.pdf

I couldn't find any exceptions to the Massachusetts law, but I did find a blog post that described another case like it. A man operating a video camera at a political protest in 2006 was ordered by the police to stop recording, but he simply hid the camera in his coat and continued to record. He was arrested, ordered to pay a $500 fine, and sentenced to six months probation.

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2007/massachusetts-wiretapping-law-strikes-again

So even though there's no exception, I would guess that the man described in the original article will receive a similar sentence. The post I linked to above also mentions a case in which a woman posted a video on the Internet that was obtained in a similar manner. The police department ordered her to take it down or face prosecution; she resisted, citing the first amendment, and the court ruled in her favor, since she did not actually make the video that she was posting. So creating the recording is a crime, but, assuming you didn't create it, you can share it with whomever you want.

I also discovered that the defense counsel for Joel Tennenbaum, who was sued by the RIAA and whose case has appeared on Slashdot before, used the wiretapping law as part of their defense:

http://blog.pff.org/archives/2009/07/print/005584.html

Oh, and this website that purports to list dumb laws that have been passed in the US and around the world. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's good for a laugh.

http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/massachusetts